


String Theory

by Eustacia Vye (eustaciavye)



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-07
Updated: 2007-09-07
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eustaciavye/pseuds/Eustacia%20Vye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sad, the days that weave in and out, the layers and strands and strings that connect us all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	String Theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alianora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alianora/gifts).



> Takes place during the R. Tam Sessions.

"No."

They look at the girl with sad eyes, knowing eyes, and I know what they will say.

_You know your brother is too busy._

I know what she will answer, too. _Yes, I know._

Sad, the days that weave in and out, the layers and strands and strings that connect us all. I see her in the mirror sometimes, the hope not quite dead yet. The girl thinks she might still have a chance of survival, but they will strip her bare and leave her bones for vultures.

_I am not progressing!_ I screech. The doctor doesn't flinch; he's trained too well to reveal such a thing, but the pulse leaps at the throat and the breath hitches ever so slightly. I feel the fear along his skin, salt of sweat searing my tongue. The violets are calling, I hear them. They creep beneath the floorboards to absorb what they can. The blood drips are nutritious. There's a pod in every pea, and I have to find the pea before it sprouts. Be careful of the tooth that claws and the teeth that scratch. I know what it truly means, the bumps and proddings and watchful eyes beneath the doorways. _They're sticking in me! It's in the mattress, and it's crawling inside me! You cut it out. You cut it out. You cut it out!_

The girl had a purpose once. She had a reason. She was reasonable. She knew things, impossible things, without need for knives and bullets and freeform exercise. She knew how to move and feel and think. And _think._ She could see, she could feel.

This girl. This. Feeling me before she fell beneath the blades, the teeth bared and blood flowing in the veins to a complete stop.

Stop.

Full stop.

No.

I know what they will say before they say it. Neurochemical and electrochemical response. Dilation of pupils and the flare of nostrils. The permutations of response flow into an absolute reality only to fracture into a thousand different strings of possibility. Schrodinger's cat has a single possible reality once grounded, and there can really be only one. Phasic photon particles will create the multiverse of possibility and reality and dimension, but only one can be observed in any given instant, if only by inference.

Inference this.

If you can attune the particles of space and time and alter the flow and resonance, phasic distribution will alter and split. We have the means but not the measure, and the flow of the packets runs diluted. Dilation begins anonce. We are ephemeral creatures in the face of time and gravity, pulled in all directions and spinning about a bent axis.

They do not understand, they do not comprehend. The girl hasn't realized this yet, and still she tries without measure. Focus. Irrelevant what the fingers mean, the laser scalpel or pincers to eyes. Irrelevant, not applicable. They cut apart a girl and created a puppet built on strings, but the resonance is inedible. Indelible. Incredible. The eleventh dimension is folded up and wound tightly, closed circle, incredible mass. We must obey particulate rules of behavior, as the decay will unsettle and settle in, decay across space time and render us all obsolete. Strings can split and connect, and form an intricate worldsheet as sight unseen. The energy limit, with ten spacetime dimensions compactified down to four, matched the physics. But this is too simple, no razorform to delineate the error. No, this is too possible. I can win this. Only bosons, no fermions means only forces, no matter, with both open and closed strings; major flaw is supersymmetry and the means of other dimensions to matter.

We matter. We do.

_People tell you things all the time, without talking._ They think I live inside their minds, taking notes and creating plot and counterplot. They think I care. _The way they move, the way they aren't talking._

They want the girl to care. They want her to believe the lies, but the way they talk without talking and the form of their lips belies the effort. We _know._

Test reports. Test and retest, post and reposte. Riposte. Chassé. Fouetté jeté. Rélevé. Echappés sautés. Grande battement en cloche.

The girl cannot dance. She is not allowed to be anything other than plasticene, malleable and flexable, turned beneath the weight of their expectations.

There are times when the static fills the air, the tension mounts and the speakers pop. The signal cannot be bent and circumvent forever. They attempt to stop the signal, pour the Queen out with the excess. I long for days long gone. The theory is easier to progress, delineate, dwell. Physical space inside my mind.

We are stuck in a 3+1 dimensional subspace of the full universe. But there are metastable vacua, each corresponding to a different universe, each with a different collection of particles and forces. There are other Rivers, other places, other Tams.

_It's the Pax._

Peace. False sense of hope. Fall into oblivion. Fall into the waking dream of equilibrium and sameness, mind numbing sameness to work for an order of their uncreation, nothing of their waking consciousness. False consciousness. It will not work on us that know, the ones that see into the realms of the multiverse, the ones who can see into the dead space of quanta. Quantum mechanics is for children. Peace cannot rise when some would fall into the darkness of an empty soul, mirror staring back and empty, fracturing into ten to the tenth pieces.

I know this. I can win this. It's the Pax. I know who is to blame, and I know how the molecules should be restructured, but no one will listen. This wasn't the puzzle they wanted me to solve, the riddle they needed an answer for.

Wax and wane, ride the wave down until the end, under the gauze and haze. Watch the eye in the camera. Someone's there. Someone's always there.

_We're doing such good work._

Yes. No.

I don't know anymore. I know what they think. I know what they want the girl to think. I know what they think I should believe.

They aren't sleeping. I feel their teeth along my skin and creeping across my spine. I feel the energy as a clamor along my bones. They can't sleep, only wake to endless rounds of nonsense and pain. There is no meaning. There is no absolution. There can be no resolution. There is no uncreation, there is no undoing. There is no way to hide this from the masses except by extinction from memory and blockade from consciousness. It did not exist. We do not exist. We are nothing, not even memory, not even ghosts.

I need to find my own vacua in the system. I need to find the place to hide the girl to keep her safe, to keep her from fracturing further. I feel the seams come undone, it unravels beneath me and disappears into the cracks on the floor.

Exercises dull the mind. Or hones. Razor sharp, like teeth.

_Can't... see... anyone. Even the orderlies wear masks._

We all wear a mask, don't we? Blue and blue and endless reams of paper and plastic and imaging structures without labels. We hide behind the infinite, the scientific, the names of places and things and unrealizable goals. We're doing such great work. Great work. We're doing it all for the Alliance, the Academy, the lofty ideals that rely on abstraction and intellectualization. There is no room for individuality. There is no room for specifics. There is no one to identify, no one to name. We are initials and serial numbers, numbers on a script.

There is no dancing. They said the girl can dance, but there is no dancing, not like ballet.

The blades come in, neural knives. There is a dance with weaponry, with death. With endless futures that don't coalesce into one.

If I am a string, I have substance and purpose. If I can be composed of strings, I have matter. I have weight. If I can compute the equation to the last decimal place, I can find volume and displacement into the other dimensions. I can find shape and meaning.

There is no absolution. There is no theory.

There are no strings.

Tomorrow is another day, another exercise, another lie. No one's coming for me. The girl can curl up inside her shell, stare ahead and go through the motions. There is no weight or substance, there is no matter, there is no shape. There are teeth buried in the mattress, rage and blood and pain, dark desire and _hunger._ There is always the hunger, the need, but no explanations and no thoughts that are not my own.

We're all bound together, we all oscillate on similar frequencies. I can reach out and touch the string that binds minds together. Intuit and know. Comprehension and understanding.

But there is no absolution. There is no resolution.

And there are no strings.

 

The End.


End file.
